Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles can be greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between Eastern and Western cultures. Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded. These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics.
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👉 Cultural learning in the context of Tool use by non-humans
Tool use by non-humans is a phenomenon in which a non-human animal uses any kind of tool in order to achieve a goal such as acquiring food and water, grooming, combat, defence, communication, recreation or construction. Originally thought to be a skill possessed only by humans, some tool use requires a sophisticated level of cognition. There is considerable discussion about the definition of what constitutes a tool and therefore which behaviours can be considered true examples of tool use. A wide range of animals, including mammals, birds, fish, cephalopods, and insects, are considered to use tools.
Primates are well known for using tools for hunting or gathering food and water, cover for rain, and self-defence. Chimpanzees have often been the object of study in regard to their usage of tools, most famously by Jane Goodall, since these animals are frequently kept in captivity and are closely related to humans. Wild tool use in other primates, especially among apes and monkeys, is considered relatively common, though its full extent remains poorly documented, as many primates in the wild are mainly only observed distantly or briefly when in their natural environments and living without human influence. Some novel tool-use by primates may arise in a localised or isolated manner within certain unique primate cultures, being transmitted and practised among socially connected primates through cultural learning. Many famous researchers, such as Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, have mentioned tool use in monkeys (such as baboons).
Cultural learning in the context of Animal culture
Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning.Culture is increasingly seen as a process, involving the social transmittance of behavior among peers and between generations. It can involve the transmission of novel behaviors or regional variations that are independent of genetic or ecological factors.
The existence of culture in non-humans has been a contentious subject, sometimes forcing researchers to rethink "what it is to be human".The notion of culture in other animals dates back to Aristotle in classical antiquity, and more recently to Charles Darwin, but the association of other animals' actions with the actual word 'culture' originated with Japanese primatologists' discoveries of socially-transmitted food behaviours in the 1940s. Evidence for animal culture is often based on studies of feeding behaviors, vocalizations, predator avoidance, mate selection, and migratory routes.